I don't think it'll corrupt the savegame, per-se, but it can possibly have undesirable effects on the game as a result of AI being processed in farther away cells than is expected, without you realizing it until much later, and having bad states persist in the save game.

I wasn't aware of those risks, so thanks for pointing them out. I'd hate to ruin a save with a buggy game state, so I may just back off to a cell load distance of 1 for now.

Since it seems you have several mods installed, have you tried disabling various mods to see which ones exactly may be causing it?

I've gotten numerous sound mods working flawlessly with my setup (Better Sounds and Expanded Sounds [separately]), but MAO crashes OpenMW 0.43.0 for me. I use "exterior cell load distance = 2", and if I reduce it to 1, the crashes disappear, but this isn't a worthwhile tradeoff for me.

Increasing the exterior cell load distance is done at your own risk. There are a number of issues that can crop up because of it (from performance problems to game stability). If you want a farther view distance the right way, leave the exterior cell load distance at 1 and enable distant terrain.

The trade-off for this is that if you enable distant terrain, increase the view distance, but don't increase the exterior cell load distance above 1, then the terrain will be blank (ie Red Mountain will load) but any other features of the land (e.g. ghostgate force field, buildings ect.) will be absent, correct?

Anyways, I had problems with MAO. When I included only the modules recommended for OpenMW in the readme, it cause all sorts of problems in my game. I couldn't drop certain items from my inventory for example.